It won’t have escaped many of our readers’ notice that there has been what can only be described as a media frenzy (mostly in the UK) with regards to climate change in recent weeks. The coverage has contained more bad reporting, misrepresentation and confusion on the subject than we have seen in such a short time anywhere. While the UK newspaper scene is uniquely competitive (especially compared to the US with over half a dozen national dailies selling in the same market), and historically there have been equally frenzied bouts of mis-reporting in the past on topics as diverse as pit bulls, vaccines and child abductions, there is something new in this mess that is worth discussing. And that has been a huge shift in the Overton window for climate change.
In any public discussion there are bounds which people who want to be thought of as having respectable ideas tend to stay between. This is most easily seen in health care debates. In the US, promotion of a National Health Service as in the UK or a single-payer system as in Canada is so far outside the bounds of normal health care politics, that these options are only ever brought up by ‘cranks’ (sigh). Meanwhile in the UK, discussions of health care delivery solutions outside of the NHS framework are never heard in the mainstream media. This limit on scope of the public debate has been called the Overton window.
The window does not have to remain static. Pressure groups and politicians can try and shift the bounds deliberately, or sometimes they are shifted by events. That seems to have been the case in the climate discussion. Prior to the email hack at CRU there had long been a pretty widespread avoidance of ‘global warming is a hoax’ proponents in serious discussions on the subject. The sceptics that were interviewed tended to be the slightly more sensible kind – people who did actually realise that CO2 was a greenhouse gas for instance. But the GW hoaxers were generally derided, or used as punchlines for jokes. This is not because they didn’t exist and weren’t continually making baseless accusations against scientists (they did and they were), but rather that their claims were self-evidently ridiculous and therefore not worth airing.
However, since the emails were released, and despite the fact that there is no evidence within them to support any of these claims of fraud and fabrication, the UK media has opened itself so wide to the spectrum of thought on climate that the GW hoaxers have now suddenly find themselves well within the mainstream. Nothing has changed the self-evidently ridiculousness of their arguments, but their presence at the media table has meant that the more reasonable critics seem far more centrist than they did a few months ago.
A few examples: Monckton being quoted as a ‘prominent climate sceptic’ on the front page of the New York Times this week (Wow!); The Guardian digging up baseless fraud accusations against a scientist at SUNY that had already been investigated and dismissed; The Sunday Times ignoring experts telling them the IPCC was right in favor of the anti-IPCC meme of the day; The Daily Mail making up quotes that fit their GW hoaxer narrative; The Daily Express breathlessly proclaiming the whole thing a ‘climate con’; The Sunday Times (again) dredging up unfounded accusations of corruption in the surface temperature data sets. All of these stories are based on the worst kind of oft-rebunked nonsense and they serve to make the more subtle kind of scepticism pushed by Lomborg et al seem almost erudite.
Perhaps this is driven by editors demanding that reporters come up with something new (to them) that fits into an anti-climate science theme that they are attempting to stoke. Or perhaps it is driven by the journalists desperate to maintain their scoop by pretending to their editors that this nonsense hasn’t been debunked a hundred times already? Who knows? All of these bad decisions are made easier when all of the actually sensible people, or people who know anything about the subject at all, are being assailed on all sides, and aren’t necessarily keen to find the time to explain, once again, that yes, the world is warming.
So far, so stupid. But even more concerning is the reaction from outside the UK media bubble. Two relatively prominent and respected US commentators – Curtis Brainard at CJR and Tom Yulsman in Colorado – have both bemoaned the fact that the US media (unusually perhaps) has not followed pell-mell into the fact-free abyss of their UK counterparts. Their point apparently seems to be that since much news print is being devoted to a story somewhere, then that story must be worth following. Indeed, since the substance to any particularly story is apparently proportional to the coverage, by not following the UK bandwagon, US journalists are missing a big story. Yulsman blames the lack of environmental beat reporters for lack of coverage in the US, but since most of the damage and bad reporting on this is from clueless and partisan news desk reporters in the UK, I actually expect that it is the environmental beat reporters’ prior experience with the forces of disinformation that prevents the contagion crossing the pond. To be sure, reporters should be able and willing (and encouraged) to write stories about anything to do with climate science and its institutions – but that kind of reporting is something very different from regurgitating disinformation, or repeating baseless accusations as fact.
So what is likely to happen now? As the various panels and reports on the CRU affair conclude, it is highly likely (almost certain in fact) that no-one will conclude that there has been any fraud, fabrication or scientific misconduct (since there hasn’t been). Eventually, people will realise (again) that the GW hoaxers are indeed cranks, and the mainstream window on their rants will close. In the meantime, huge amounts of misinformation, sprinkled liberally with plenty of disinformation, will be spread and public understanding on the issue will likely decline. As the history of the topic has shown, public attention to climate change comes and goes and this is likely to be seen as the latest bump on that ride.
Amdreas says, “Why not start with all the things that matters and separate them to avoid confusion?”
I would say that one must start with the science because the policy must be predicated on the best science and the acceptance thereof. It is probably even a mistake to have WG 2 and WG 3 be part of the same IPCC process. WG1 is not only able to cite peer-reviewed research for its summary, it really must do so to maintain credibility. It is natural for people to become confused and think WG2 and WG3 must as well. However, they operate under different rules and constraints. Given their charter, it is fine for them to cite un-peer-reviewed literature as long as the result does not wind up driving the overall risk calculus. At the same time, even though the conclusions of WG1 are more certain, they are usually phrased more carefully. Meanwhile WG2 is merely trying to identify credible threats, and WG3 to come up with meahnigful responses.
Now, Andreas, can you imagine if they threw in policy and politics and psychology along with climate science, impacts and mitigation? No one would believe any of it.
The basic problem is that people don’t like the message and the consequences will affect their children and grandchildren rather than them. The result is that they are gunning for the messenger, and it doesn’t matter who the messenger is
848 Ray Ladbury: Thank you. I’ll get the book. Although my own direct engagement in science ended as an undergraduate, I count among my good friends of several decades two chemists and two geologists, all Ph.D.’s. I respect the intensity of the enterprise.
Andreas – climate skeptics have only “superficial” debate to offer on any aspect of the climate question – they deny the basic science, deny any human involvement in climate, accuse scientists [and everyone else] of trying to destroy the economy, call it all an “environmentalist conspiracy”, or an attempt to create a “one world government” and claim everyone [except them] is just out to get grants or protect their job. Doesn’t that about cover what you say “matters”? The purpose of the IPCC was supposed to be to collect and collate the science to be used as a basis for policy decisions, how can that be accomplished in a way that the “opposition” won’t/can’t attack, when they’re opposed to any change in anything that touches on economics or governance? Of course “only basic science matters” when basic science is what can effect educated policy making.
I strongly disagree that WG1 denies human involvement, it in fact discusses the rapid recent increased atmospheric CO2 as emissions induced, one of the points that skeptics most strongly object to. It also contains studies relating to deforestation and land use. If you’re saying that any/many/most scientists have an “emotional” concern about their planet’s future viability, I fail to see how that negates the science, particularly when you appear to say that those who profess a concern for their own socio-economic status quo should be given a priori consideration.
> S.Matthew
> It looks to me like an incompleteness in the AGW model that the rise
> in temperature has the oscillatory pattern that it has …
It may look, eyeballing the charts, like the rise in temperature has an oscillatory pattern, but that isn’t really there. How can you test this?
You can look this one up. Give it a try, it’s good practice.
Sorry to be off topic, but what I find amazing is the deniers arguments. I recently discussed AGW, and tried to explain the best I could and think I made some progress. Problem and the oxymoron was that he felt that technology would be able to save us even if AGW was true. Somehow people have a disconnect between science and technology. I don’t know maybe I’m wrong but without science there is no technology. For me, they are synonymous. Okay maybe not. Technology is the application of working science. Yet in America today we love technology yet there is a disdain for science. I have to say that the chicken and the egg argument is clear in that science came before technology as it is the definition of technology.
S.Matthew:
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Afourier+analysis
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/cyclical-probably-not/
Andreas Bjurström,
If you want to move forward with the discussion you want to have here, could you perhaps state the problem you see more clearly? If you’ll excuse me saying so, for someone who is concerned with the framing and communication of climate change, you are not communicating very well with your present audience. (Perhaps you are relying on tacit knowledge in your own field and what you’re saying is immediately obvious to a sociologist of knowledge — but I doubt it).
So what is wrong with framing climate change as a matter of physical science? If you want to “start with all the things that matters and separate them to avoid confusion”, isn’t it a good thing that the physical science basis is handled in a separate IPCC working group from the working groups that consider economic issues and policy instruments? On what basis do you claim the climate problem has been framed as if “only basic science matters”? And what on earth has the IPCC, or this site, done to “force” the poor sceptics to debate the basic science, rather than engage in more productive debates on all the other “things that matter” in defining policy?
Perhaps a good start would be if you could sketch an alternative, so we could have something to contrast the present system with. How should the IPCC (or an alternative body if you prefer, or a supplementary one) organize its work, from what fields should it recruit, and how should it frame the issue of man-made climate change? Why would this be better? – Give it a shot. It would make it easier to discuss. And you might be able to use it in your thesis.
:)
841 – Fixible.
You said:
“RealClimate isn’t “blog science” it’s science research reporting by scientists, well supported with extensive references to actual research, “blog science” is found at the denialist sites that offer opinion unsupported by peer reviewed publications and primarily referencing other opinion pieces or MSM”
Re-read this and then try and empathise with say, an AGW “neutral”. The neutral will read your paragraph something like “blog science is rubbish unless it comes from the RealClimate blog and contributers to other blogs sites are either big oil or charlatan denialists.
As an aside, in an earlier comment in response to someone telling me that unless I agreed with them then my opinion is irrelevant or incompetent, I likened this to some sort of master race thinking. This provoked a response from Gavin that I was overreaching – which is fair, and I apologise for that – but why does this site continue with the highly “loaded” adjective “denialist” when referring to someone like me? If Realclimate wants serious contributions from serious people (albeit less knowledeable) then I suggest you ban the word “denialist”. It is not used as a description of someone, it is meant as an insult isn’t it.
Getting back to the “feel” issue, I accept that you see a huge difference between say, Michael Mann and Steve McIntyre in terms of their climate knowledge. From my observations, Mr McIntyre claims to be a statistician rather than a climate scientist and much of what he writes are attempts to highlight things that are, in his opinion, false representation of statistics.
The Hockey Stick, to me, appears to be about the interpretation, adjustment and weighting of various pieces of data.
As a layman, albeit a reasonably intelligent, experienced and worldly layman, I observe that the integrity of the Hockey Stick graph is highy dependent upon interpretation and subjectivity of the creator.
As far as I can see, Mr McIntyre has, and is, for instance, questioning the interpretation and weighting of the data – which is about statistics – and is therefore an area which he can rightly claim some considerable experience. Maybe even more than Mr Mann? On the other hand, it is equally clear that Mr Mann’s qualifications and experience demonstrate that there are lots of areas where few people can match his knowledge.
Sticking with the Hockey Stick, and as I said previously, this graph is key to the AGW debate in my view. Put simply, if one believes the graph, then the uptick is a killer argument for AGW. If however, the earlier IPCC graph showing the wavy line MWP and LIA is nearer the mark then that is a completely different story i.e. it has been warmer in the past, current warming isn’t unprecedented and the last decade is not the warmest in history.
[Response: This is your main mistake. Read what would happen if the hockey stick were wrong. – gavin]
Rightly or wrongly, I have read what has been written by both sides with respect to say, the tree ring data and, at best, I cannot give it the weighting (which is subjective) that it carries in the Hockey Stick graph and the resultant scary graph.
Maybe because we all love a bit of scandal, we are predisposed to over-emphasise the importance or relevance of mistakes or failures in proper procedure, or subjective adjustments.
For instance, I have read much about UHI and what each camp has to say about the subject. Personally, I find it shocking that there doesn’t seem to be any definitive research into the effects of UHI. You do not need to be a climate scientist to know about the impact of UHI – you just need to be a motor cyclist! I live in an area of countryside and regularly ride my bike into towns and cities at night. It often feels like someone has turned a heater on as you enter a town. Without any data to back this up, I would suggest that UHI in the towns and cities that I have experienced on my bike often accounts for an increase of up to 5 degrees, maybe more – and, as far as I can see, this is not represented appropriately in the adjustments – at least I don’t think so.
In a similar vein, but so it doesn’t get lost in this post, I have a science question in the following post.
Have just found your web site and it is great to read. I have just been reading Richard Dawkins, “The Blind Watchmaker” and found a quotation on oposition to Darwinian evolution that, with a few changes (eg evolution to anthropmorphic global warming)could apply to the climate change sceptics. It reads
“There are people who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism. They seem to fall into thre main classes. First, there are those who, for religious reasons, want evolution itself to be untrue. (For religion, here read self-interest). Second, there are those who have no reason to deny that evolution has happened but who, often for political or ideological reasons, find Darwin’s theory—-distasteful. —Third, there are people, including many working in what they often call, ‘the media’, who just like seeing applecarts upset, perhaps because it makes good journalistic copy—”
It seems to me that much of the opposition to global warming comes not from a scientific assessment as often this opposition is constructed on comments that have been well researched and demonstrated to be most probably erroneous but from a psychological position that we (ie the sceptics) cannot be to blame for anything. Good luck in trying to convince them, though.
Question with respect to UHI –
I understand that UHI exists and is subjectively taken into account in temperature records.
Bear with me here.
I understand that this means a particular temperature reading is adjusted to take into account its location. I get that.
Now, apologies if this has been discussed before or that I am being extremely naive, but what relevance or contribution is apportioned to the absolute heat generated by UHIs in their contribution to global warming?
UHIs must be created by 2 forces. Firstly, it must be the release of heat generated by roads, car parks, buildings etc that have been warmed by the sun or air.
Secondly though, there must be a contribution to UHIs by the heat generated by all of the hot air and gasses generated by everything from light bulbs, air conditioning outlets, car exhausts, cookers, factories, etc.
Each village, town and city has thousands and millions of heat sources (other than the released heat from the fabric of roads and buildings) generating heat. On a global scale, these billions of heat sources are adding this heat to the atmosphere aren’t they?
At what point is all this heat generation material to a contribution of the earth’s temperatures?
Is this not a potential reason why global temperatures may rise as a result of human activity – rather than CO2 per se?
Andreas (850)
The IPCC concept of “policy based science” always seemed to me to be fatally flawed.
Science depended on skepticism for progress while policy required consensus to be effective. Much of the “warmer/denier” acrimony stemmed from attempts to require consensus in science that could not really be achieved. Instead, “science based policy” became more and more the IPCC requirement.
You are right, the problem is much more the failure to consider scientific boundaries. Specialization has always been recognized as important within a scientific discipline. It has always been difficult to comprehend and/or communicate externally. Climate science, like software or computer science is so new that the specializations, let alone the boundaries, have yet to be established.
We may have to continue to use policy based science as a foil in the struggles for our divided planet.
[Response: I don’t recognise this at all. IPCC is policy relevant, but policy neutral – not ‘policy based’. I have no idea what ‘policy based science’ even means. There is some ways that the IPCC could go to become more policy relevant, but this seems completely orthogonal to your point. – gavin]
SM: “I meant 1980-2010. It looks to me like an incompleteness in the AGW model that the rise in temperature has the oscillatory pattern that it has”
Ah, so you made a mistake. Quite a big one. And in such a short message too.
Ergo you have no science and you’re wrong.
Or at least this is what Climategate/Himalayagate/*gate has told us and you’ve never really admitted this is complete claptrap.
And your problem with “looks like” is that you’re matching a pattern you WANT to be there. You have concluded a priori that the temperature rise has an oscillatory component.
This is either technically true but pointless (each winter it’s cooler in the north than in summer and that reoccurs, etc), or completely unsupported by anything other than a mathematical only analysis that takes as its axiomatic base that you MUST fit this temperature trend to a minimum number of oscillatory components.
You can do that sorf of fft to a noise.
That noise may be a soft hiss like “ffffff”. Your mathematical model would then say “this noise is a continuing soft nonsilibant hiss like ‘fffff’ and it will continue to do so”.
However that is the first fraction of a second of me saying “fraud”.
When your model breaks so easily, it is no model.
And such FFTs are not done to predict where speech will go but as to what in the past has happened and is the basis not of predicting the next word, but interpreting speech to text.
It is a post-hoc process, not a predictive one.
Oddly enough, the exact same “issue” denialists attribute to physical GCM models and thereby dismiss out of hand any prediction.
Funny how the same people who MISTAKENLY ascribe post-hoc process with a potentially predictive one of the physical GCM models and proclaim such models can NEVER predict the future push a “model” that has inextricably linked into its very procedures no capability to predict, and yet ascribe to that non-predictability model a prediction that would turn up “any year now, just you wait and see”.
Don’t you find it remarkable too?
JP: “Step 4 If Gartner buys policy from AIG for assets it holds on to them.. Neither AIG or Gartner knows the future of the asset.”
Gartner knows the contents and made them up.
If I mix up some arsenic and some almonds and sugar and so on to make some lovely marzipan to put on a battenburg cake, when I bet on my significant other’s life with a life insurance policy whether my S.O. will survive to 50, one of us DOES know the future of the “asset” being bet on.
Because I know what toxic means.
Gartner knows what a bad debt looks like. They’re *supposed* to avoid them. But they found a way to make money off them whichever way they go.
The reason why this is even vaguely OT is because it shows that there are players in the human-created game of “economics” that WILL (unlike foxes) deliberately destroy the game if they can make short term gain for themselves and are innured by those gains from reaping the results of the game plan devised.
two moon,
Not that I want to deprive Spencer of royalties, but the text is available here:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html
Give it a read.
SM@849
Our brains are excellent tools for picking out oscillatory behavior. In fact studies show that out of 5 systems we’re shown with oscillatory behavior, we’ll identify 20 out of them. (Sarcasm off)
There are actually many different ways to get behavior that looks cyclic, mainly because most systems do fluctuate about a mean. For instance, graph the series:
1,2
2,7
3,1
4,8
5,2
6,8
7,1
8,8
9,2
10,8
Sure looks oscillatory, doesn’t it? It’s the first 10 digits in e, the base of Napierian logarithms, a transcendental number, so you know it’s digits must be random. There’s a lot more to “cyclic” than just going up and down.
Ray Ladbury and flxible,
It is an intellectual paradox that the IPCC (largely) exclude humans from the climate system at the same time as they rightly address the problem of human induced climate change in the Anthropocene.
I have a forthcoming publication in the journal Climatic Change where I demonstrate (with bibliometric methods) the disciplinary emphasis in the IPCC different working groups (and chapters) and the separation of different disciplines and their respective domains of research (lack of interdisciplinarity). I suggest reasons for this (historical trajectories, academic organization, political strategy) and argue why the IPCC approach (exclusion of many bodies of knowledge and separation of climate and humans) is in adequate for addressing climate change. The reviewer writes among others “Well-designed research … A solid contribution to the question of bias … The paper offers solid explanatory material”. Let us discuss in the peer review literature. I look forward to a reply!
Andreas,
First, have you ever read Dunning and Kruger’s paper? See here:
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:3gtWwaN9-k0J:www.scirp.org/Journal/PaperDownload.aspx%3FpaperID%3D883%26fileName%3DPsych.20090100004_39584049.pdf+%22Unskilled+and+Unaware+of+It:+How+Difficulties+in+Recognizing+One%27s+Own+Incompetence+Lead+to+Inflated+Self-Assessments%22&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
They actually found the opposite of what you assert. We are most vulnerable to overestimating our ability before we acquire skill. Now a researcher may well be overconfident in applying his expertise outside of his discipline. He may not even know the limits of his expertise. However, it is fairly safe to assume that a climate scientist will be more circumspect about climate science than some ignorant food tube on the internet.
You talk of preconceived ideas as if 1)their existence would be a revelation to scientists; and 2)as if climate science were only being performed by a small, tightly knit group rather than a highly competitive network of organizations competing for grants, recognition fame and glory. If one of my colleagues manages to delude himself into a false theory, I’m going to point it out to both him and the community, because 1)it’s my job as a scientist; and 2)discovering an error enhances one’s own prestiege.
Andreas, for all your talk about observing scientist, you don’t really seem to understand much about how they work. I’m not saying this to put you down. Your picture of how science is done is unrecognizable to working scientists. I think you need to talk to some scientists and find out why they do the things they do. I realize that might not be as easy as it sounds. A lot of scientists don’t give it a lot of thought. Some do, though, and you will get a ton more insight talking to some of these guys than you will by “observing” or reading crap by Feyerabend and other charlatans.
> 866, Andreas, need for interdisciplinary climate work
Gavin and others have been saying much the same thing for years. Here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arealclimate.org+interdisciplinary
Congratulations on getting the idea published. I know there are programs working to educate a new generation of students in this way. It’s good to see the idea becoming more widely accepted. I can remember talking to people about this in the late 1960s, working on the first Earth Day program.
CC: “Each village, town and city has thousands and millions of heat sources (other than the released heat from the fabric of roads and buildings) generating heat. On a global scale, these billions of heat sources are adding this heat to the atmosphere aren’t they?
At what point is all this heat generation material to a contribution of the earth’s temperatures? ”
The number of humans in the DENSELY populated UK is 250 people per km2.
Average power usage is 300W per person worldwide average.
Therefore each square meter gets 300×250/10^6 watts from humanity.
0.075W.
compare with the average power density of insolation of 250W/m2.
Humanity is not as densely populous and it is not on any of the oceans which occupy most of the surface area of the earth.
Humanity would have to grow a millionfold in number to get within spitting distance of solar power.
[edit]
> C.Chutney,
> I have read much about UHI and what each camp has to say about the subject.
Oops. Did you actually search for the science? The “camp” stuff is probably blog science, which is to science as military music … you know.
> Personally, I find it shocking that there doesn’t seem to be any definitive
> research into the effects of UHI.
Oh. There’s your problem. You didn’t find the research. This is shocking, but hardly surprising.
You’re using Firefox? add Google Scholar to your search engine choices using the “Manage Search Engines” link at the bottom of the search box menu:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=scholar&cat=all&advancedsearch=1&as=1&appid=1&lver=3.6&atype=0&pp=20&pid=3&sort=&lup=
Or bookmark this: http://scholar.google.com/schhp?hl=en&as_sdt=2001
Once you start looking in the science instead of the blog science, you’ll have better luck finding the science. Funny how that works. You know the story about the guy who goes looking for an argument, but ends up finding abuse? That’s likely to happen to anyone looking for science at blog science sites. You end up in the PR/opinion/denial universe easily.
Here’s the kind of thing you’ll find easily using Scholar. I’m picking an example here off the first page of results, NOT telling you this is authoritative or up to date or correct. The “Wisdom” search tool didn’t work out, you still have to think about what Scholar finds you.
http://www.actionbioscience.org/environment/voogt.html
So you read through that and note the relevant footnotes, which are:
17 Böhm, R. 1998. Urban bias in temperature time series: A case study for the city of Vienna, Austria. Climatic Change 38: 113–128.
18 Kalnay, E., and M. Cai. 2003. Impact of urbanization and land-use change on climate. Nature 423: 528–531.
19 Changnon, S.A. 1999. A rare long record of deep soil temperatures defines temporal temperature changes and an urban heat island. Climatic Change 42: 531–538.
You put _those_ into the Scholar searchbox, find them at their original publication sources, look at the “citing papers” link, look to see if they were properly cited in the first paper (does the actual paper he footnoted say what he says it says on the exact single point for which it’s cited?).
This becomes a routine and gets to be something you can do really quickly; I’m only a third of the way through my first morning cup of coffee, so ….
Hey, my coffee’s stone cold. Gotta go. That should help.
Aside: youcaneffingooglescholarit doesn’t have a proper picture or URL link, but it really should be done by someone
Charlie Chutney – Gavin has responded to your weighting of the “hockey stick problem”, I’ll just add that your focus on it as “interpretation, adjustment and weighting of various pieces of data” thereby being amenable to Steve McIntyres attempt to discredit it as a “false representation of statistics” ignores the fact that it’s not an “opinion piece”, it’s science. If McIntyres starting position is that current/recent temperature changes aren’t important and the Mann study is “opinion”, it’s his statistics that are the “false representation”.
And that’s what I said about the difference between “blog science” [although McIntyre isn’t necessaily the worst of them] and the real deal, which doesn’t have to be “only RC”, but includes many other actual science blogs, including the “Other Opinions” list and “Science Links” on the right sidebar. RC is an exceptional factual resource. Blog science IS “rubbish” if it comes from blog sites of “either big oil or charlatan denialists” or folks who’s starting point is to deny the facts of climate science. As initially a “neutral” myself, I wound up reading a lot of what’s been posted at RC [the articles much more than comments], and easily discerned the difference. You seem to be reading a lot of responses you’re getting here very defensively and narrowly, and that may be a function of your need to study the science more. Use of McIntyre to question Mann indicates to me you haven’t actually thought about the science enough yourself, but maybe I’m wrong. I do know that science isn’t opinion or your judgement or democracy.
Charlie Chutney said: “On a global scale, these billions of heat sources are adding this heat to the atmosphere aren’t they?”
Yes they do add to it. Just like a kid peeing in the swimming pool raises the water level.
“At what point is all this heat generation material to a contribution of the earth’s temperatures?”
At the point when it becomes a significant fraction of the total heat flux. I don’t have time to dig up the numbers but I just finished reading David Archer’s book GLobal Warming: UNderstanding the Forecast) which is a good starting place if you want to actually learn the science.
From memory the total solar radiation is 173,000 TW (TW=terrawatts). I believe Archer said mankind uses 13TW, although I thought we used more, maybe 20TW. It doesn’t matter at this level of approximation, so say we use 10-20 TW.
CO2 forcing is a few watts/square meter. I got 5 x 10^14 square meters for the earth’s surface if I calculated correctly. If you take 1W/sq meter as the scale of CO2 forcing you get 500TW. I believe a more accurate number for CO2 forcing is 2-3W/m^2 so that the CO2 forcing totals at perhaps 1,000TW, which is a small fraction of the 173,000TW incident upon the planet and which dwarfs the 10-20 TW which is mankind’s rate of energy consumption.
Is this not a potential reason why global temperatures may rise as a result of human activity – rather than CO2 per se?”
I guess it depends on what you mean by “potential”. We (mankind) would have to increase our rate of energy consumption 100 fold to get into the ballpark of CO2 forcing. Realistically the answer is simply no.
For CC:
http://www.google.com/search?q=heat+from+human+activity
finds quite a few answers to this, all in the same ballpark. One from the first page of hits is:
“… total human energy production was 13.5 TW in 2001. Since total Earth surface is 510,100,000 km2, the extra heat works out to be some 0.02 W/m²”
The question has been answered at RC several times before, but at the moment I can’t recall the right search terms to find it.
Throbgoblins nails it again:
http://throbgoblins.blogspot.com/2010/02/rigorous-scientific-debate.html
Andreas, my perception is similar to Ray’s @867. From your comments here, it appears you have a limited acquaintance with how the earth sciences are actually done. If you are arguing for an interdisciplinary perspective, it behooves you to become familiar with the distinct perspectives of each of the disciplines. You’ll be taking on a huge task by doing so, and you’ll want to hold off making judgements until you’re much farther along than you evidently are. Otherwise, you’ll simply confirm Dunning-Kruger.
That may have been 8,333 rather than 833,333 mind.
865, Ray Ladbury: Sure looks oscillatory, doesn’t it? It’s the first 10 digits in e, the base of Napierian logarithms, a transcendental number, so you know it’s digits must be random. There’s a lot more to “cyclic” than just going up and down.
The temperature of the earth has been nicely fit to sum of a linear and a sinusoidal function, with the linear having constant slope and the sinusoidal having a period of about 60 years, so there is more than just an “appearance” of oscillatory behavior in the record. Any GCM, to be believable, has to model that record about as well as that. Other oscillatory models include those of Latif and Tsonis.
I don’t think credentials matter much on a blog, but I do have a PhD in statistics, and experience modeling oscillatory multivariate biological systems, such as circadian rhythms. I have experience with dynamic models, vector autoregressive models, and Fourier models.
Way back in the days of Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, a dynamic model for planetary movement replaced the simply descriptive epicycles model, but the extrapolations of the epicycles were accurate over many future periods of the several systems (mercury, earth, venus, mars.) By analogy, extrapolating the linear plus sinusoidal trend in average earth temperature might be good or bad idea, but the dynamic models have not yet been shown to be more accurate, so the extrapolations from them have not been shown to be more reliable — and they certainly are not more parsimonious. Latif’s and Tsonis’ models are roughly similar over the next few decades to the linear plus sinusoid, Tsongis’ more similar than Latif’s.
Ray, this comment from 852 was addressed to me, but it applies as well to your 305/395 typo: Ah, so you made a mistake. Quite a big one. And in such a short message too. . CFU seems to be trying to reinforce the meme that real Menschen never make mistakes, not even in casual typing.
Gavin @ 858:
That’s a most excellent link.
While I have personal issues with the “Hockey Stick”, most of them involve the influence of the solar cycle on decadal weather. Since the sun appears to have woken up (and to me, at least, validated my beliefs about sunspot cycle influences), we’re now entering the other half of the denialist argument — okay, so we didn’t warm so much while the sun was asleep. The next few years as we climb to Solar Max aren’t going to be so kind, and the Hockey Stick may well turn into a Stairway to Hell. Let’s hope the denialist brigade isn’t so insistent it’s wrong when we — G-d forbid — add the next step on that stairway.
Hank Roberts @ 873:
There might be a bit of an amplification from land use changes, but as I had to point out to a client, UHI from Dallas/Fort Worth =does=not= reach all the way to Waco. Heck, UHI from Austin doesn’t reach to where I live in Far North Austin.
One of the things my company is starting to work on is multi-purpose solar that has the potential to reduce some UHI effects by using solar to create shading for large heat sources. It turns out that the commercial value of solar-PV-produced shade exceeds the energy value. Instead of carparks being sources of UHI, they can become more comfortable places to park a car … that also offsets the energy usage of nearby businesses.
@857 CM,
The rationale for the IPCC working groups are basically: Cause (WG1), Concequence (WG2) and Response (WG3). My argument:
A physical scientist would say that human induced climate change is caused by the physical properties of CO2. I would say that it is caused by humans. Thus, I want humans and the social sciences to be incuded in the study of causes to climate change.
WG1 (to examplify and substantiate what is lacking):
One chapter on human causes to climate change (population increase, production, consumption, material and energy flows, etc.).
One chapter that contextualise the climate change problem (the history of climate research, written not only by physical scientists, but also historians of science among others, the rise of environmentalism, globalization, how the discussion of climate change has been altered throught the 20th century, e.g. from military over technocracy to environmentalism). Contextualisation is usually on the top of the wish list of policymakers. They need the context to be able to comprehend and use the knowledge.
WG2:
This working group is the only broadly interdisciplinary working group. What is lacking:
One chapter on the evolution of mankind and societies and how this is related to a changing climate (i.e. the broad long term historical overview of adaptation to climate chagne and creative interaction of humans and climate. This would be very valuable as we all know that climate has been changed radically in the past, yet we ignore how this relates to human societies).
WG3: Strong focus on technological and economic quick fixes. What is lacking:
Analysis of social institutions, power, social structure, culture, politics, behaviour…
SM,Come on. You’ve done Fourier series before. You know that you can fit any function to a sum of sinusoidal functions. Matthew, many, many cycles in nature are not truly periodic. That includes pole flips for the geomagnetic field–although this is quasi-periodic, the “solar cycle”, and on and on. There are many different physical systems that exhibit quasiperiodic behavior. Really, Matthew, I very strongly suggest that you look at Tamino’s analysis.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/cyclical-probably-not/
> furrycatherder
> solar shaded parking
Yes, this is a brilliant one; the panels will be slanted so heat doesn’t collect underneath and snow doesn’t collapse the structure, as I’ve seen them done elsewhere.
This kind of setup can also capture the rainfall/snowmelt off these acres of material before it falls onto the oil and coal tar asphalt parking lot, diverting the ‘first flush’ of each precipitation event to filter out the dust, you’ll have a water source as well as a power and shade source.
Kind of like trees, without the root problems, I guess.
864 Ray Ladbury: Not to worry. I already ordered it from Amazon. I like having the book in my hands.
“880
Andreas Bjurström says:
24 February 2010 at 1:22 PM
My argument:
A physical scientist would say that human induced climate change is caused by the physical properties of CO2. I would say that it is caused by humans”
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!
Sorry.
No, it’s caused by CO2.
It’s because humans are burning fossil fuels that CO2 is increasing.
[edit]
“877
Septic Matthew says:
24 February 2010 at 12:52 PM
The temperature of the earth has been nicely fit to sum of a linear and a sinusoidal function, ”
This is true of ANY single-valued line.
This doesn’t mean that the line is predicted by a sum of sinusoids. however.
Septic Matthew (877) — Please read
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/cyclical-probably-not/
Careful analysis of many climtological time series demonstrates there is just
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise
(approximaely) on decadal to centennial scales with the miunor exception of the sunspot cycle, of course. Certainly nothing wth a period of 60 years; you’re seeing bears which aren’t there.
Andreas:” One chapter on human causes to climate change (population increase, production, consumption, material and energy flows, etc.). ”
Ah. now we see Andreas’ motive. It’s the old “elephant in the room” request. Too many people and anything other than just letting things be and waiting for people to stop bonking so often.
It takes 2 generations (50 years) for population control to ***START*** unless you try it the same way Hitler did.
But his point is that we shouldn’t do anything other than complain about all the third world people having too many kids.
Oh, and the trailer trash in the first world too.
Leave it for the nice upper middle classes.
“IPCC is policy relevant, but policy neutral” (Gavin).
To quote the objective of the IPCC in this manner is not a valid statement. The statement does not refer to any peer review literature. There is no empirical backing. Your mere turn an objective into wishful thinking. As researcher, you need to examine the facts. To refer to authority that is substantially void in this particular issue is deception (similar to how religious leaders invoke gods and Holy Writ).
Sorry Gavin, CFU, Ladbury, Flxible, Mal Adapted and others,
I rest my case, since I know it is futile to discuss such issues with you guys. You have reasons for your point of view and it is not based in expertise from the right domain of knowledge (just like the sceptics).
Andreas Bjurstrom, I’m sorry but I see no pacticality behind what you recommend. What you are suggesting would fill a small library. What policy makers want to know is: what is the threat, how sure are we, what can we do about it, how long do we have to decide, and what will different actions accomplish.
Andreas – responses to your “inclusions” to WG1 by the “opposition”:
population increase, Those freakin scientists/politicians are calling for forced sterilization and birth control! [fundamentalist Christians, large American representation, see Utah]
production, They want to ruin our economy!! [see current grousing by middle America about corporate shift of jobs offshore]
consumption, They’re trying to deny us the god-given right to a comfortable life, want to send us back to the stome age!
material and energy flows, It’s the government trying to control us!
etc. ETC!! ETC!!
Those things are all items that may be appropriate to WG2 or 3 as interpretation of why the science is important, but understanding of the climate does not require understanding human use/interpretation/effects of it, and effects on it by human activity should be rather “self-evident” to policy advisors with a bit of intelligence.
I think you’re trying to make the entire IPCC into a socialogical document [“deniers” would say a political document], when it’s meant to provide a scientific basis for each individual country to design the social policy they feel appropriate to their situation, which is why it’s so far been a futile exercise to get any real agreement on a global level. Maybe what’s needed is an additional separate organization to elaborate on the reasons for the global failure of concern for the global environment. I might agree that human motivations of self and own-group interest [tribalism] are at root of the objections, but they won’t be countered by trying to incorporate them into the physical science. Nor by turning a 3000 page document into a 6000 page one!
Andreas Bjurstrom uses a different meaning of cause: “A physical scientist would say that human induced climate change is caused by the physical properties of CO2. I would say that it is caused by humans. Thus, I want humans and the social sciences to be included in the study of causes to climate change.”
You are mixing up proximate cause with ultimate cause. Policy makers know about the ultimate causes (humans and their specific activities such as land use, emissions, etc.). However, to do risk analysis policy makers need to know the physical effects, which is based on physical science. Including various -isms and social sciences will mislead some people (who policy makers have to listen to in democracies) into thinking the science is determined by these considerations (and those people will tell the policy makers to ignore exactly those facts which policy makers need to consider). Some people are going to be susceptible to false claims that science is just opinion. This is what the current denier PR push is lately. The best defense is exposing the false accusations and innuendo for what they are, and by keeping rigor in the physical science literature. People will eventually catch on, particularly the young.
We must also get people (including Rod B and A. Bjurstrom) to understand how scientists make decisions on how how likely something is to be correct. Let us say experiment A says with 90% confidence ( 1.0 – 0.1) that sensitivity of temperature to doubling of CO2 is 3 degrees C. Let there be a later independent experiment B (based on a completely different method) that says the same thing. The likelihood goes up to 1.0 – 0.1*0.1 = 99%. Rod B had the rather poor Bayesian prior that the experiments were not independent when this issue came up, showing that his estimation of what is correct or incorrect in AGW is based on facts that aren’t. A. Bjurstrom’s prior was that all the scientists had a preconceived ideas that blinded them to alternatives. Again, a poor choice of a prior, given the actual existence of scientists who explicitly reject these ideas. Bjurstrom then decided to throw out the word paradigm to a physicist! Anybody who has studied the history of physics knows how Einstein changed just two assumptions, preconceived ideas if you will, and got crazy results. The response of the physics community was not to reject them out of prejudice, but acceptance because he had the goods. The deniers are rejected because their work is crap. All one has to do as a non-expert is follow the publication and citation trail.
Andreas #880,
Thanks for outlining what you’d like to see changed in the IPCC reports, as I asked. You have some interesting ideas, and as a dabbler in history, I’d sympathize with some of them. It was a nice touch that AR4 introduced a chapter on the history of climate science, and I think it could do with some more attention to the historical and social context, including shifts in the public role and perception of science over the 20th century. I also like the idea of taking some space in WG2 or 3 to look at how human societies have adapted to climate change (or bitten the dust) in history — there should be some valuable lessons to be learned, and a lot of myths to pop. Regarding what you miss in WG3, perhaps a useful suggestion would be to include a discussion along the same lines as is found in WG2 sections 17.3 and 17.4?
But what purpose would it serve to add “human causes” to WG1? WG1 does a good, necessary, and clearly delineated job explaining how human emissions are changing the climate. Why blur the focus of WG1 with more human geography material? Isn’t it more useful to discuss why humans cause climate change in the context of how to stop them causing it, i. e. in WG3? In any case, the “human causes of climate change” do somewhat enter into the existing WG1 report in form of the emission scenarios (discussed in detail elsewhere) underlying the projections.
Septic Matthew – with your background, you will probably enjoy
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/dangerous-curves/ and
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/cyclical-not/
then on the question as to whether the fit of sinusoid has any physical meaning.
“””Monckton being quoted as a ‘prominent climate sceptic’ on the front page of the New York Times this week (Wow!); “””
How can anyone be qualified to be a skeptic unless they publish in peer reviewed mainstream scientific literature that holds up over time and/or quote the peer reviewed literature that holds up over time. These guys are ignorant phonies who are misleading the public to possible disaster.
This is most likely how ancient civilizations failed -Easter Island, Norse colonies, Pitcairn Islands (Collapse, Diamond, 2006 -1283 citations).
CrumblingCoralGate.
Also, StudyInExaggeratedLedesGate:
“All of the tropical coral reefs in the world will be disintegrating by the end of the century because of the rising acidity of the oceans caused by a build-up of man-made carbondioxide in the atmosphere, a study has found.
Coral reefs start to disintegrate when the acidity of the oceans rises beyond a certain threshold, and this point is likely to be reached before 2100, said Jacob Silverman of the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington.”
(bold mine to illustrate editor’s inability to resist spicing things up even when reality is only few words away…)
More:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/coral-reefs-in-danger-of-being-destroyed-1908544.html
Of course it’s all done with models, which any blog-scientist knows are fraudulent. Go ahead, lower Michelangelo’s “David” into water and then gradually add hydrochloric acid with confidence, because you know calculations predicting the statue will vanish are just a model.
flxible (871), as an aside, questioning Mann’s hockey stick is not so much questioning science as it is statistics.
> S.M.
Well, you came in not long ago acting like a youngster who needed a lot of help finding the basics. Now you’re claiming a PhD and extensive knowledge about the same material you’ve acted clueless about.
If you’re just making stuff up or copypasting stuff that looks clever, you won’t be able to cite sources. Show us you’re real, eh? Build some trust if you want conversation.
Dr. Judith Curry of Georgia Tech has today posted to a number of climate blogs an essay that is germane to this discussion.
Andreas@880,
OK, I see a wee bit better what you are advocating. I’ll agree that perhaps a history chapter could frame the issue, and there is a need (albeit, I’m not sure there’s a place in the IPCC process) for some review of the forces driving exponential increase in fossil fuel consumption (population, energy-intensive economic growth, international development). These could perhaps be used to motivate the various scenarios. As to the history section, a condensation of Spencer Weart’s work would do nicely. I do not agree, however that climate change as far as WG1 is concerned has anything to do with the modern environmental movement. The first prediction of anthropogenic warming came from Arrhenius, and subsequent developments all played out as part of atmospheric physics and chemistry out of which climate science grew. And really the only role the military played was as a funder of some atmospheric research.
The WG2 idea might also be implemented on a somewhat less ambitious scale–a chapter (brief) essentially outlining why climate change is a concern in the context of the history of human civilization.
The WG3 stuff, probably isn’t ready for anything like this.
If you are at all serious, Andreas, you would have to stress brevity. The less you alter the current structure, and the more you make use of existing resources e.g. Spencer’s history, the better your odds.
http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/